Escape From Bosnia

With Local Help, Refugees Flee To York County

YORK — Boban Blazanovic lived in a two-story house on a hill overlooking Kakanj, a town 30 miles south of Sarajevo, when the fighting began in the former Yugoslavia in April 1992.

Blazanovic thought the fighting would end quickly. "I couldn't believe there was going to be a war," he says through an interpreter. "It's the end of the 20th century. I thought people were civilized enough."

The fighting persisted and eventually reached his quiet, peaceful town of 30,000 people.

Blazanovic, wanting to stay neutral, left with his wife, Sanda, and baby, Andrea, who is now 1+ years old. After months of moving from territory to territory, struggling to avoid the draft, they reached Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Finally they found amnesty in the United States in September.

The Blazanovics were resettled through the Virginia Council of Churches Refugee Program in Richmond, an affiliate of the Church World Service in New York, says the Rev. David Montanye, council director.

The Blazanovics are the first Bosnian family the council has resettled in the Hampton Roads area, although three other families have been resettled in Charlottesville, Montanye says.

The Blazanovics are among them. Now, as Blazanovic sits with his wife and daughter on a donated couch in an apartment provided by St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Yorktown, he knows he is safe. He is eager to find work and financial independence here.

Blazanovic has little choice but to build a new life in the United States. Nationalism in Bosnia is likely to continue for years, and as long as it does, he can not return to his native land.

Blazanovic, 31, was born and raised in Kakanj. He almost finished a degree in forestry from the University of Sarajevo when he decided to become a merchant. He owned three stores, one for clothing, groceries and liquor. Sanda served as his accountant, and the couple planned a wedding, expecting to spend their lives together in Kakanj.

Then the fighting started. They hoped to postpone their wedding until the fighting ended; but it didn't, and the couple married in November 1992, Blazanovic says through interpreter Natasa Goronja, a Kakanj native who came to the United States in 1991 as a foreign exchange student. Goronja, now 20 and a student at the College of William and Mary, hopes eventually to return to the family she has not seen since arriving here.

For the Blazanovics, the fighting crept closer and closer to their community. Finally, shortly after the wedding, two warring factions fired ammunition from the surrounding mountains.

The shells could be heard 15 seconds before they hit ground, which gave them enough time to seek shelter behind furniture, Blazanovic says. While their house was never hit, windows and doors shattered and broke all around them.

Then one day a bomb was set off in one of Blazanovic's stores. The family feared the next one would be in their home. "We felt like our lives were in danger," Blazanovic says.

Shortly after that, in October 1993, armed soldiers forced Blazanovic and his family from their home. At that time Andrea was 6 months old.

"It's a very hard feeling psychologically," Blazanovic says. "You feel like a second-class citizen. There's no one you can go and complain to."

For the next few months the family traveled throughout the various territories, always moving so Blazanovic could hide from the draft. Their goal was to reach Belgrade, the Serbian capital, where there was no fighting.

Finally, in early 1994, after months of seeking shelter with relatives in the various territories, they reached Pale, a town near Sarajevo in central Bosnia.

There, Blazanovic's aunt got the family a certificate allowing him to take his wife and daughter to Belgrade provided he promised to return and fight. Blazanovic did not return, and the family immediately applied to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for amnesty.

Not all applicants are accepted, however, and conditions must be met. People seeking asylum must be able to prove, for example, that they are not safe in their hometowns, have been assigned to a concentration camp or come from a mixed marriage, which was the case for Blazanovic, who is Serbian, and his wife, who is Croatian.

The Blazanovics waited for six months, meeting with five different committees, hoping their application would be accepted. Finally the International Organization for Immigration sent the family to Budapest and then to the United States in mid-September.

The Blazanovics were told they would have a sponsoring organization that would provide them with food, clothing and a place to live. They were also told the organization would help them find employment.

So far their four weeks in the United States have greatly surpassed their expectations. "They told us to expect little. So when we received a lot we were very happy," Blazanovic says.